Digital forgeries are hard

Reality: Casual forgery is pretty easy. Forgery that will stand up to expert examination is very hard. And impossible if you're a bungling incompetent, as this guy seems to be.

There's also been a few cases over the years of forged documents being spotted by changing MS Word font defaults:

One example: https://gulfnews.com/world/asia/pakistan/calibri-controversy...

I wonder why we don't have better (widely trusted and used) timestamping services. It has always been easy to prove that something happened after a certain time: take a photo of today's newspaper, mention stock prices, etc.

But proving that an event happened before a certain time, like in the article, is a lot harder. You can send someone an email through a trusted gateway, but people can only check by having access to that mailbox, or trusting the person who has access. And I know about PKI timestamping, but I've never seen them used for legal cases, maybe because the complexity erodes trust.

Are there any good solutions that would convince a non-technical judge?

Edit: I remember Twitter[1] being used for this purpose, but I don't know if today I'd trust a hash dropped there, given how much it's evolving and/or struggling.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26609183

Wow this guy is a prolific forger! Not knowing the details of the case, doesn't he risk getting a book thrown at him for introducing forged evidence?

Holy smokes isn’t forging evidence a crime?

Even if it’s hard to prove exactly that he did it, there’s a strong motive and means and a lot of pretty shocking evidence of forgery here.